The optimal place in which to place,
take control. It becomes clearer, it is nothing... Some end of
history, of human redundancy... At the face of the logic of
perpetuation... And those arts, those high-minded themes, they never
much concerned themselves with anything more than existence, great
themes beyond mere urvival, the kinds of abstractions supposed to be
available to an entire and peaceable humanity... The end (aim) of all
of these processes that have corrupted the very integrity of nature.

But... Perhaps for man to realise
herself she must find herself at the end of history, looking for an
exponential theory of knowledge that got beyond itself and way out of
hand... Out of (literally) hands... Leaves her (kind) seeking to take
back basic labours for a sense of control, to compose everything that
came before as a universal politics, a daily demonstration of the
aesthetic of politics. Man came to herself and her senses
simultaneously... With sheer boredom to blame for all this waste and
bureaucracy, the self-perpetuation, the self-perpetuating logic of
displeasure, Empty-headed fatalism in reply, to answer for all the
crimes of “societies”, “civilisations” posited by labours of
the oppressed.

(Cut two). I can't remove the scare
quotes from civilisation, that, as this, is not my place. I keep up
with the latest trends in science exasperated by universal incapacity
to acknowledge and take pains to follow through on the myriad
revolutionary promises of technology. Mechanisation and overabundance
were never ver supposed to lead to contemporary inventions of labour
after nothing, and these restrictions posed on development through
attacks on any kind of knowledge that isn't restricted to a set of
specific commands from on high. A woman with a degree in the textile
technology spends her working life putting through all those
discarded clothing and spend hundreds of dollars on the cereals for
the tapestry she doesn't have spare time.

Pattern:
from patron: from pater (father). Working all the time to get enough
money together to be able to subsist, indulge in ancestral habits
that used to amount to subsistance. Acting out the language of the
universities, proofs of systemic imbalance, lacking the certainty and
supposed sanctity of their origins. No longer to do anything
different, the best use to be put to: the most use. New media as
presenting interface, a world independent of its source (the matter
of screens troublingly sourced from environmentally and socially
destructive mining practises and all-too-easily discarded leaving
burgeoning environmental disasters to those already disadvantaged by
the cycles of redundancy). This, the weirdness of a society that
would present itself as independent of its source materials and
source narratives. This Christian fundamentalist project of
immaterially realising the material world and then projecting it back
into the world (a necessarily unsustainable social necessity).
“Pictogrammic" painting/collage... the language as much as its
physicalisation the raw material, each material, every source, every
process reading into and of itself, the best expression of this
helplessness, this loss. This is what I will leave you with. This is
what I am left with. Raw. Raw Material.

JACKET FRONT.

At the time of writing this, it is
still not clear if I can actually do what I set out to do and make
this zoot suit. My hands are ink-stained and slippery with the
machine oil from the sewing machine. I am aware of them.

As a society we are almost shockingly
underprepared for the aestheticisation of our existences, the loss of
necessity, the loss of the necessity of work... Where still, most of
what is spoken to as advancements are devices that “save labour”.

What the mass organisation of people
produces it has no use for, absurdities, inefficiencies,
overproduction... These unconscious autonomous factors that drive
every interaction from those inherent in the language that we use to
those products that we use to both perpetuate and augment our
existences, with the pressure to create I kind of social capital
increasingly affecting every facet of bare life, concurrent with the
realities of contemporary precarious work, unemployment, and on the
other hand, longer working hour, the realities of post-industrial
society seem to be the most obscure perversion of the promised future
(driven by technology) of even the most Conservative economist of 100
years ago (and notably Milton Keynes).But still, the privileging of
labouring against labour, ofnt being bound to the to the conditions
of our existence, of never knowing how it is that this world is
constructed around us, though we may lament it, though we may find it
alienating, though we may spare no expense in petty exercises of our
creative capacities, remains a privilege alone for the inescapable
reality of world poverty, of the certain knowledge that the place of
one's birth has everything to do with the relative value of one's
time. I can afford to buy enough of my time back to learn to make
myself a suit. I can afford the comparatively expensive raw material,
the cost of virgin fabric and thread and trimmings . The same cannot
be said of those involved in the majority of clothing manufacture.
And my part in all of this means very little. I know enough of things
of how things work that I do not need to know. This pattern was
downloaded by the Internet from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,
via the pattern project, they recently purchased what is perhaps the
last zoot suit in existence. When I first read about it, the reason
for this given was that the suits were over-large, utilising too much
fabric and where cut down during the war, as part of the “war
effort”. It struck me as similar to evidence of my own
grandmother's wartime mentality; she worked in a textile factory in
Geelong and loves to mention that when her and my grandfather was
first married she used to make almost double what he did... Still an
inconceivable notion for most of what remains of working class
people. It also made me think of a rather silly mediaeval
interpretation of ancient art, the purity whiteness attributed to
marble its apparent preciousness is a material, where actually
bronzes were far more highly prized, though relatively few survived
due to the inherent value of bronze, which was often reused or
“up-cycled” into instruments of war. The vision of the
desirability of the marble complexion is a result of an accident of
time and history, where marble sculptures were brightly coloured in
pigments worn away by time. (Actually there was also a short period
in which marble statues was ground to make lime mortar, just as an
aside.) In any event, there has certainly never been a society or
time history as wasteful as ours. But it transpired that this rather
dismissive statement that the suits were cut down for the war effort,
neglected to mention so many essential facts of the matter as to be
on th borderline of an approximation of the structural racism of the
media. It is true, there were sanctions imposed on fabric in America
during the Second World War; though especially in California as these
were largely targeted at the zoot suitors or Pachuco and Pachuca, a
large number of Mexican labourers that had immigrated to California
to work as farmhands while American citizens fought overseas. The
Zoot suit was adapted from a revolution in tailoring known as the
“English drape”, a broadening of the shoulder line against a slim
waistline. This basic shape was then inflated either by local tailors
or the wearers of the suits, to allow free and easy movement,
necessary for the elaborate dance moves of the jazz age, and then
allegedly also for the concealment of weapons. The zoot suit itself
has become part of an aesthetic synonymous with organised crime, as
little organised it might appear upon reflection, when it is related
to those systemically a disadvantaged by their birth and the colour
of the skin. For white Americans the zoot suit became a symbol of the
wearer's deliberate flouting of American values, a disrespectful act
against the troops sent off to fight in foreign lands. To Mexican and
Mexican-American youth they were symbolic rejection of both Mexican
and Mexican-American values, neither of which truly served their
interest. The influence of jazz on youth culture went about as far as
Hitler feared. Even in prewar Germany youth of both genders
fraternised and danced freely, rejecting the values of national
socialism, of fascism, on the rise. A generation of jazz-loving kids
reputedly spent their time beating-up those who did join the Hitler
youth in the days before the war. They have all been lost to history.
The Mexican kids, the girls that wore the suits alongside the boys,
were targeted by the government, and the boys accused of raping white
women... shades of Trump and Schumer. The suits they took so much
pride in, often their only suits, the suits that they wore to church
on Sundays, were mostly shredded by ex-servicemen with razorblades
attached to their shoes for that very purpose.

JACKET BACK.

Raw Material, as much as this project
is come to demand working through and against my own disproportionate sense of guilt. I have
always used waste and by-products in my work, I've never been able to
bear using virgin materials... The problem goes back as far as I can
remember... Long before even I conceived of it as a kind of zero
impact art, but I can't bear the thought of unsold and thereby unused
paintings that would only poison the earth from whence they came.
When I was younger I would fish crecycling bins for pieces of paper
to work on, to satisfy this need to communicate something without
taking anything. I have examined every angle for potential
wrong-doing this in anomic suicide of supposed relativism. This
pattern was drawn and copyrighted by the Las Angeles County Museum of
Art, this pattern taken from a zoot suit commissioned by an unknown
man, by an unknown tailor, both likely long-since dead, and this
thing now belongs to history, and the history does not belong to me,
but that history has always been claimed. At some point one can only
acknowledge one's own indebtedness and with that one's complicity.
The suit began its life as the innovation of an English nobleman
streamlining a move away from any extraneous adornment, chiefly due
to a lack of funds brought about by a lavish lifestyle, towards an
obsessional level of both tailoring in grooming. Beau Brummel was
famed as much for spending hours performing his toilet, which the
Prince Regent like to watch. Several works of literature were
inspired by Brummel, durig his lifetime, including one in which the
main character abandons this “dandyism” when he comes across a
waistcoat he designed being worn by a “natty apprentice”. Beau
Brummel died, having been for the second time put in debtors prison,
young, and of syphilis. He was a friend of Lord Byron, the very model
of the rockstar who was said never to wear the same (silk) pants
twice. Yves St Laurent is said to have revolutionised Fashion when he
is in 1966 he released “le smoking”, a woman's Tuxedo, at a time
in which it was still controversial for women to wear pants... I
remember hearing somewhere of him saying that it made women appear
more feminine because it made the curves of their bodies more
apparent by the comparison. But in 1940s Los Angeles, young Mexican
women “Pachucas” wore zoot suits, oversized suits, and behaved as
did their male contemporaries. The suit would again be revolutionised
in the '80s, inflated once more by the great Franco-Japanese fashion
houses, Yohji Yamamoto, Commes des garcons... Like the boys... the
same line, the same attitude of the 40 years previous. As practical
and beautiful as ever it was. And this was the mode of dress that I
grew up with, parents in uniform inflated monochromatic suits and
boots against the salmon think Ralph Lauren shirts and pastel
skirt-suits of '80s Adelaide money, hospitality entrepreneurs from
the wrong towns, who would go on to have the coolest clubs where the
bar staff and bouncers would disdain “suits” and disallow them
because they would harass women. And I cannot stop thinking about how
my father thought of me, and treated me as an equal.

UPPER SLEEVE (1.)
It wasn't so long ago that a widely
held theory had it that the universe will go on expanding right up
until it collapses back in on itself... Human beings have never had
very much imagination when it comes to infinity... apparently now
it's is believed that the universe will go on expanding
indefinitely... As our knowledge, which becomes ever more
improbable... As every thought leads me to another, basically a
prejudice developed as it was lived. And every generation believes
with some certainty, that it is will be, the last. And every
generation is the last. There are those that want so much is the
world to end, and so many that won't want to only our time back from
for prefabricated experiences. It took me weeks of agony, of
agonising to get this together, to get this right the first time. I
only really had one chance. I have been no better for the technology,
the exponential understandings that augmented and facilitated my
existence, I have been as good or better at singing for my supper as
my forebears, have not shied from hard labour. There is one constant
in the human.

(2.)
My father passed away two months
ago, and everyone spoke of how well-dressed he was, how cool he was.
It is rare to see a man to take so much care with his appearance, to
have made a virtue of vanity. And I have always resented that it was
expected of me, and from whoever it was so expected... But for all
his myriad faults, I took from dad never let men behave as though
they are invisible, as if their dress is neutral. I can never hope
for positive feedback from learning and writing as I can't from a
good outfit or a good photo of me posted to social media and so I am
led to express myself through adornments, and so I interrogate men's
dress just the same. Same as dad.

(3.)
Living like there's no today...
Conspiracy theory's that became practice, the future as the
self-fulfilment prophesied by megalomaniacs and depressives... A
heavy burden of proof on the shoulders of anyone trying to act in the
interests of anyone other than themselves, to do so they must be
beyond reproach, or face much harder censure than those who do harm
unapologetically... Isolated the more for and by love... Wealth is
proof enough of its own worth, to fail to aspire to ownership is
tantamount to submitting to being owned. But these are just normal
symbols... Fictions of pleasures derived from sadistic billionaires
as a kind of psychosexual appropriation which woman is capable of,
which has always amuse me enough to deeply disturb me, it's all quite
hard to make sense of, these patterns, the structure of things as
made to be repeated... Pattern from father, pattern as foundational
understanding, inherent in words: their history, every tangent
evident of its source, of my history, and all about or supposed to
amount to what is unknowable, the closest approximation of living.

UPPER SLEEVE (4.)
The fabric coming to mean so much more
from this very mundane use, the very substance of the thing...
Weaving had so long been associated with femininity and wisdom, the
expertise, the deftness of experienced hands... working together,
talking, waiting to get the stories that all the kids must've heard,
grown up with, the particularities of the cloth and the language, the
underpinning of all culture. Before the Victorian era, to be a
spinster was largely a positive thing, it meant that one had a trade
and resources of one's own, that one was independent, not dependent
on being traded off in marriage but could choose whom to marry.
Industrialisation must've had the alarming effect of taking away work
from women, who had always borne the largest share of it... Labours
largely domestic for survival, even to thrive. To take the
responsibility or even the capacity to work from women, to make them
largely decorative, as the wealthy you had long since become,
undermine the fabric of society, those compelled by their station to
maintain the society, to provide basic needs and services were then
feminised in such a way as might be considered an insult. These
devices save labour, and that will be will not compel me to become a
middle manager, but I will not be decorative and idle like the
wealthy.

Zoe M. Robertson, “Zoot Suit”, 2016. Linen/cotton.

PEGGED TROUSER FRONT.
They that make up “the one” by
which all else are “other”, they are the minority, even within
their own societies, regardless of how homogenous they may be. These
oversized suits, this inflation of the tropes, the impositions of
English imperialism, holding itself as whiteness or Americanness...
This overinflated whiteness,... Even this has been reappropriated...
For my generation the most obvious reference for the zoot suit is the
Jim Carrey movie, “The mask”, which is unfortunately a much more
common reference, at least among white Australians, then Spike Lee's
“Malcolm X”, which begins with a lot of amazing jazz dancing and
beautiful zoot suits. Of course Malcolm X went on to reject this
earlier mode of dress... It seems to have been all but forgotten that
the first protests against the Vietnam war came out of the civil
rights movement. The most democratic the most solemn reminder of
inequities in the failure of an allegedly democratic society is to
fairly allocate resources, the state of constant uncertainty, the
lack of safety that comes with precarity, that can only get worse
against the insanity of overproduction and consequent waste. It is
impossible to fully quantify the influence of African-American music
on the last hundred years of history. Martin Luther King Junior
thanks for the soul music stations for making the civil rights
movement possible... And through COINTELPRO, the American government
sought to pervert the politicisation of black radio and black music.
Even the language that one uses to distinguish oneself as part of the
youth culture owes everything to jazz-speak... For white people words
like “cool” are synonymous with youth, the aspirational and
infantile... Indefinite use of privilege to work and never to
maintain or to make... Until this life of middle management finally
grinds one down and all that is left is the dream of use, the
fetishisation of ignorance and inexperience... This is the dream sold
by the wealthy, these ever smaller segments of the population that
control the worlds resources... It may in fact be true that the only
fact is the absurd ramblings of powerful white men, only they have
the power to change, and so things will largely stay the same until
they can no longer. All perverted from work to an infantilism, and
this is what is desirable, it is not to do anything well, everything
is homogensied, fame without substance, history without substance,
more work doing nothing to distract the majority away from their own
circumstance, default modes of oppression, justified by way of it
just being as it is. It is never for the ethnic European, the whites,
to acknowledge the weirdness the specificity of their own culture...
It is not theirs (ours) that is never “other”... Realism was a
conceit of the European Christian, and it was somewhat threatened
with redundancy when the photograph was invented... the camera always
betraying the eye of the user, the uncertainty of the world of any
world, any perspective... Just as in the romantic era of poetry it
was desirable to think like a woman with actually out actually being
a woman in order for art to retain a sense of it's own. And in order
for art to retain a sense of its own poignancy, its own authorship,
other ways of being had to be explored, meaning other cultures had to
be appropriated. Around the turn of the 20th century African art was
assimilated into Modernist paintings... Followed by different modes
of understanding transience being adopted from the Eastern
Philosophies, largely containing the notion of the Postmodernism in
scope... This and all else I have inherited.